Catch My Hand
by Nina of the Galaxy
Summary: In the dominators shared dream, Laurel and Oliver actually did elope, right there in Queen Mansion. He never made it to the wedding, but that doesn't mean he wasn't left a parting gift, when they woke up, he was still wearing his wedding band, and had the engagement ring in his pocket. Several weeks later, a knock on the door reveals a familiar face.


When they finally returned home, Thea put down her bag, helpfully made in the Waverider, and sunk onto the couch. Everything they had been through, it was different. They were different people now. How could they ever forget what they had been through? The first aliens they saw, and they were trying to destroy the planet. Well, except Supergirl, she was cool.

Supergirl, she smiled at the idea of supergirl. Kara reminded her of Laurel. Laurel, who was so smart and brave and wonderful. She was the only sister she ever wanted. She looked to Oliver, who stood in the kitchen with his hands on the counters, looking down at it.

"You think she's happy?" Thea asked, breaking the silence.

He looked up to his little sister. She asked the impossible question. They both knew what she meant. Laurel. Dream Laurel. Was she happy? God, she was always like that, asking the tough questions. They could both do it.

He came out of the kitchen and sat next to her. He put her head on his shoulder and stared at the empty fireplace. Laurel would have insisted on this gorgeous night that they light it. "I think that she got her happily ever after," He told her as he felt himself choking on the words. He thought about that moment when he told her that she deserved more.

She deserved everything in the world. Thea nodded. "I miss her." She said. "Everyday."

All Oliver could do to keep himself from crying was nod. Nothing seemed right without her. They should be a team. They should be running the city together. She was the most competent assistant district attorney in the whole city. She rose through the ranks on her own merit. She should have been the District Attorney for him.

Thea looked up at him and wiped away the stray tear. He blushed a little. She was always going to be a part of their lives. They were always going to talk about her. He looked up to his little sister who loved that woman so much and couldn't believe that through all the fuck ups that he made, the one bright and shining moment of his life was that he brought those women together.

He cleared his throat. "You know," He said. "I always thought that when we got married that we would hyphenate. And I thought you would want to take her name too."

Thea nodded. "We can still do that," She said to him.

And honestly, it wasn't a half bad idea. He thought about it all the time. Giving her a legacy. But he didn't want it to be weird. People would think it was weird to take the name of your dead ex girlfriend. How could he take that?

He kissed on the forehead. "I'll think about it," He said, before leaving the room.

They didn't talk about the conversation they had on that couch for several weeks. They didn't talk about Laurel at all, in any of those weeks. Or the dominators. Or the dream. He wanted to tell her about going through the dream.

No one noticed, because they were all too busy trying to get out of there, but when he went into the dream, in his Arrow suit, he wasn't wearing a wedding band. And when they got out, when he had a minute to himself, he noticed one on his finger. When he put his hand into his pocket, he also dug out the engagement ring that was on Laurel's finger. It was in a box, maybe a sign?

He pushed it all away at that point because he couldn't think about it at that moment, but now they were going into Christmas, and it was always her favorite season. He held the ring box in his hand as he sat on the bed. He thought about the dream so much lately.

"Today, I want to marry you," He said to her. And it was the first time he was sure of anything since he didn't even know, really. He hadn't been sure about anything in a long time.

She smiled at him. "Well, that's good, because there are guests here," She told him as she put her hand on his arm, trying to comfort him. He was a good guy and he just got cold feet last night, but he was there now. That was the important thing. He showed up for her.

"No! No. No. No." He said, more firmly and it startled her a little. "Not for guests. Not in a few hours. Now." He almost demanded and she wasn't sure where his head was at. They'd been planning this for months. She'd gotten her sister here which took a miracle because film school was where she found her passion.

He just sounded so scared. And his rambling, it didn't make sense. Something had spooked him. This was not normal. And they were supposed to be getting married in a few hours, with all the bells and whistles. It was an important day. It was a chance for Robert and Moira to show that Oliver could finally settle down into a commitment.

He kept going. "Laurel, I need to get out of here," And there he was, rearing his ugly head. The old Oliver Queen. But then he said something else. "We can elope," And that was when everything changed.

"Oliver..." She said to him, trying to get a word in.

He shook his head. "No, I'm being serious." He told her. "I don't know what's going on with me now, I just know that I want to be with you. As quickly as humanly possible,"

It still felt so farfetched? Was he worried about what people would say about him? He never cared about that. But nothing else fit. Nothing else seemed like why she would get this person instead of the person that she had spent her whole life with.

"Oliver," She said, in that calm and gentle tone that made him want to crumble. "What is going on?"

He looked at her beautiful face. He looked at her with her beautiful smile and that beautiful necklace on her neck and in that gorgeous dress. He shook his head. How could this not be real? How could he dream up this much beauty when he had never deserved it in his life? "Last night someone reminded me that I have everything," He confessed. "And I don't want to give it up. I'm afraid that I'm going to give it up."

He could barely catch his breathe. God, all he wanted was right there in front of him.

And all she smiled at him and it was the most beautiful smile he'd ever seen. "Well, that's very sweet of you," She told him. "But we have over two hundred guests coming. And your parents, they spent a fortune."

It was her way of saying that they had to go through with this. That they had obligations. But she still saw him. She understood why this was hard. He was never very good with all of those people. Maybe that's why. It wasn't, but it was easier to believe than he was acting out of character for no reason at all.

"I know," He said as he looked away. His parents, in this life, they were so supportive of him. They were so supportive of her. He opened his eyes and looked back at the ground. "And I'm sorry if this is confusing or if I'm scaring you, but the only thing in the world that makes sense to me right now is that I love you," He said.

And her smile finally came back. The real one. The genuine smile. Not the one she had on when she was trying to get him out of this funk he was in. She looked so happy, because his love was the only thing that she had ever counted on. She only ever wanted him. She loved him with all of her heart and it as nice to hear that he did too.

"And I'm gonna take that job at Queen Consolidated. And I swear to god, I'm going to work every single day to be the man you fell in love with," He told her.

She gave him a kiss. They could do this. They were ready for anything.

A knock came at the door and it opened. A man she didn't know. "Do you have a second to talk?" He was looking at Oliver.

He nodded and went to the door, she held onto his wrist and before he left he looked back at her. "Go give him a minute and then come back here. I've got a surprise for you." She said to him as she let his wrist go and he went with the strange man.

When he came back, he saw Laurel standing there, with the marriage certificate, two of their friends from college, and the officiant. He looked at her strangely and she gave him the marriage bands that they selected a while ago.

"What is this?" He asked her.

She took his hand and smiled. "We're eloping," She told him. "Right now. In this room. You want to get married?" She asked. "We can do it right now, with none of the pomp and circumstance."

And they did it, right there. They got married, exchanged rings, promised their lives would be entwined forever, and kissed before a priest. The other wedding, it would never come to pass, but in his picture perfect dream, Laurel married him and they were going to be together forever.

"What you got there?" Thea said, and it brought him out of the dream again.

He shook his head and tried to hide the box, but Thea wasn't having it. She took the box from him and opened it. There was a beautiful ring in it. It was Laurel's ring. Actually, it was their mom's ring, but it was supposed to go to Laurel. She wanted Laurel to have it. Thea had been too young to be thinking about marriage when Moira died, but Thea would have wanted it to be on Laurel's finger anyway.

More importantly, it was the one on Laurel's finger when they were in the dream. "Did you dig this out of a drawer somewhere? I thought you gave it to Felicity," She said to him.

He shook her head. "This isn't that one," He told her. "This one, it was in the pocket of my alien gap outfit when we came out of the shared dream."

She nodded. That was pretty important. He didn't say anything about it. Probably, because he didn't want to have to go through the whole thing, but there was time now. There was time to talk about the dream and in a concrete way.

"Something happened in that dream," She said to him.

He sighed and nodded. That was one way to put it. He smiled though. It was the best thing that could have happened. It was a gift. "I got married." He told her and pulled out the wedding band and put it into her hand too. "We eloped."

Thea chuckled. That Laurel Lance, she was always great to her brother. "Well," She said, "I think these mean something," She told him after a couple of minutes. She put them back into his hands and looked over to him. "None of the rest came back with anything," She told him.

Well, that answered that question. This was meaningful. It had to be. He looked at the rings and smiled. "You know that's the only regret I have, is that you couldn't be there to see it," He told her.

She knew. But the fact that he got his happy ending, that was enough for her. She didn't need to see him get it. She could be his cheerleader. And that was okay to her. "Well, if it meant you getting your happy ending, I'm happy." She told him. "But you should go to bed. You got a big press conference in the morning."

He was awakened not by the alarm or Thea pleading with him to get ready for the press conference, which was very important, but by the doorbell. He groaned. Who was at the door at…, he looked at the clock 6:30 in the morning? God, who was even up at the 6:30 in the morning? He wondered. He threw some pajama pants and went to the door.

He must have been dreaming because there she stood, beautiful, with her hair back in a ponytail and that canary necklace around her neck.

"Ollie?" She asked him in the smallest voice.

It was all he could do not to weep. What had he done right? How did this happen? How did she end up here in that beautiful suede jacket and that rich maroon top and that necklace? He wrapped his arms around her and she was real.

He felt a tear slide down her cheek. God, she was real. She was here. She was crying. He didn't know how it happened, why she was alive again, but by god, he was not going to lose another chance to have happiness.

Thea ambled into the living room and saw the door open and Oliver in the middle of the doorway, holding someone. "What's going on?" She asked. "It's only 6:30 in the morning." She told him before she came closer.

Oliver let Laurel go and looked back to Thea. "She," He said. He couldn't find the words. There were no words to describe what had just happened.

Thea brought Laurel into the house and closed the door. She said nothing, but made some coffee and let Laurel and Oliver look at each other like they were the only things that either of them could count on. The love, it was amazing.

She took the coffee and set it in front of them and took a sip of her own. "As much as it's good to see you guys like this, I think we need to call Cisco. And Felicity, but mostly Cisco and the STAR Lab gang,"

Oliver nodded. "Yeah," He sighed.

Laurel looked at them both with a quirked brow. "I don't remember anything. Everything's just a blur. I just woke up and I was drawn to this place," She said.

He knew that feeling, a little too well, but he never wanted her to feel those things. All the stuff she'd been through, she shouldn't have to go through that feeling. It was awful. He kissed her gently. "We're gonna help you through this," He said, gently, "You just..."

She nodded. She trusted him. She had that look. The look that said that I don't know what's going on, but I trust you. It was the look that she had the very first time she met his mother. They were in the Tenth grade and he brought her to some big charity function and she looked Laurel up and down and he knew that she expected something awful to come out of his mother's mouth. Moira had a reputation for being cutting. She was a good business woman, but she could be something else. And when he looked at her, she stood there looking at him with that exact same way she was now.

Thea stood in the kitchen and he went and stood by her and looked over at Laurel who was quietly enjoying her coffee. "What do we do?" He asked her.

"Well, I called Cisco. He and Barry, they want us to come over to Central City. But we still need to do the press conference. If you cancel this one, it'll look like you're hiding something," She told him. He nodded. That press conference could go to hell in his mind, but she had worked hard on it.

If he was going to do the press conference though, that meant getting into some better clothes. He couldn't very well do it in pajama bottoms. He went to get a towel from the linen closet and then he thought about the rings in his bedside drawer.

He shook it off. The rings, they were a thing for later. He would talk to Cisco about them. They would talk about why this perfect vision was here. He got in the shower and Thea gave Laurel instructions on having something ordered so that she could eat while they were out.

Oliver made it through the press conference. It was about a dedication. Boring stuff really, but it needed to be done and it was hard enough getting Oliver to take his mayorship seriously. Thea rubbed him on the shoulder and led him back to the car, where they went back to the house, where Laurel still was.

He stood in front of the door. He didn't want to go in. He couldn't believe it. It had to be a dream. He was still in his bed and he was waiting for the press conference to happen.

"You okay?" Thea asked.

He nodded and pushed open the door. Laurel was standing out on the balcony, looking at the city skyline. "Laur," He said, huskily.

She turned around and looked at him. "I don't remember my life. Any of it. I keep thinking about what brought me here and where I was before here, and I don't remember anything." Her voice trembled and it wasn't at all who she was.

He wrapped her in his arms and smoothed over her hair. "I promise you," He soothed, "We're gonna figure all of this out. We're gonna go see the people who can help us figure this out right now. Okay?" He asked her.

She nodded and calmed down a little. Good. That was good. He was glad she wasn't too freaked out. He pointed to Thea, who took Laurel's hand and helped her down to the car. It was just him in the apartment for a minute and he went to his room and took the rings out of the bedside drawer.

He felt the box in his hand and put the wedding band on. It felt right. It felt right to have it on. She was here. It felt like something he should do. He didn't even know if she remembered the fact that she got married. He didn't know anything about her life right now, only that she was here and that was more than enough for him.

He went downstairs with the ring in the ringbox in his pocket and got into the car. They drove all the way to the train station, where they got on the bullet train and bought the best seats that money could buy, and they were on the way to Central City. As a family.


End file.
